He was leading the horse by the reins, moving at a pace that was wrong, too deliberate, too careful, the walk of a man compensating for something. She crossed the wet ground toward him at a speed she would not have been able to explain rationally. "Thomas." He looked up. Something moved across his face.
Relief was part of it and something more complicated that she didn't have time to examine. "I'm all right." He said. "You're not walking right." "I twisted my ankle on the creek bank."
He said it with the flat tone of a man minimizing. "The ground gave out. I went down the bank a few feet before I caught myself." She was beside him now. She looked at him with the comprehensive attention of a woman cataloging damage, the mud on his coat, the way he was holding his left arm slightly away from his body, the cut above his eyebrow that had bled and dried and was going to need cleaning.
"Your arm." She said. "I caught the fence wire when I went down." "Let me see." "Clara."
"Let me see." She said with a precision in her voice that was not a request. He let her look. It was a gash from the barbed wire, 4 in at least, running along his forearm where his sleeve had torn. It had bled enough to soak through the fabric and had done its clotting work, but it needed cleaning and it needed to be looked at properly.
She took the horses' reins from him. "Put your hand on my shoulder," she said. "I can walk." "You can walk better with something to balance on. Put your hand on my shoulder and don't argue with me about it."
A pause. He put his hand on her shoulder. They walked back to the house like that, her with the horses' reins in one hand and his weight partly against her and the wet Texas ground under their feet and the storm moving off to the east leaving behind that particular washed clean silence that always came after. She was aware of his hand, the weight of it, the warmth of it through her coat. She was aware of other things, too, pressing up through her chest, things she had been putting in cabinets for 3 weeks and this was not the moment for them, so she kept walking.
The children met them at the door. Noah pushed through first and threw both arms around Thomas's legs with a force that nearly unbalanced him and Clara grabbed his arm on instinct and held him until he steadied. And Noah said, "Papa," in a voice that was barely a word. And Thomas put his good hand on the back of Noah's head and held it there. Jacob looked at his father's arm.
He looked at Clara. She shook her head slightly. "He's all right." She watched Jacob's shoulders drop 1 in. Emma had water on already.
Clara didn't ask how she'd known to do that. She had simply known. Luke stood in the kitchen doorway and said, "The creek flooded." With the gravity of a boy delivering a report he had privately predicted and was not happy to have been right about. "It did."